Grazin’ In The Grass!

– – Shut up and eat your creamed spinach! New research has suggested that early human ancestors in central Africa 3.5 million years ago ate a diet of mostly tropical grasses and sedges before evolving a taste for meaty flesh.

After studying the fossilized teeth of three early human relatives excavated at two sites in Chad, Oxford researchers found the signature of a diet rich in plant foods through analysis of carbon isotope ratios in specimen teeth. They were not equipped as carnivores are with sharp teeth and also lacked cow-like guts to break down food such as leaves, so probably feasted more on roots and bulbs at the base of the plants. Their diet was more like that of a cow than that of a Great Ape, indicating that our ancestral human diet diverged from that of the apes much sooner than was previously thought…